Will here. Thanks for OpenDev last night and all the good discussion. So I talked with a few of you about climbing the learning curve on vim, emacs, whatever.@icholy, you knew about some good guides to get going with vim and some other stuff - it was hard to hear you so I couldn't quite get it.

I gave a talk at DevTricks in 2014 about Vim. Slides are here. @joeperic talked Emacs at the same one (he might have his slides available too somewhere?). @ianmcdonald is also an Emacs user and loves to talk Emacs, if you get a chance to corner him at the next DevTricks.

Emacs is a fantastic resource for learning emacs. Also some decent YouTube tutorials and articles are around, plus an interesting looking new-ish book called Mastering Emacs (I haven't read it though, so maybe I'm not a master?). I've tried to learn vi and emacs, and found emacs to be significantly more intuitive for my brain and hands.

After you know the basic commands and remap your Caps Lock to be a Control key, the docs and help functions are good friends. No one could ever hit a point of knowing everything you can do with it, which is exciting and weird. Emacs definitely makes my job more fun and efficient.

I have the simplest and most basic dotfiles you've ever seen (no zsh, sorry everyone ever), and a really primitive but simple AF way to manage/share/version them.

.dotfiles/ lives in my ~/ and I have a crude and poorly written bash script to symlink the files it contains. I just started using Spacemacs so the readme isn't too clear but that is basically just one .emacs.d directory cloned from their github which rounds out my silly little set up (which works perfectly for me).

Thanks everyone for the input. Now for an update -Spacemacs wins. It's not for veterans apparently, but it's perfect for me. I have 329 packages installed, configured and ready to go with minimal effort. I am climbing the learning curve while having something that can be used.

Vim and emacs are different tools; apples to oranges. No wonder the debate never ends. So I found out vim is a like a 'text-editing language' or 'keyboard language' while emacs is more about meta-programming. It makes perfect sense to have vim keybindings a'la evil within emacs. Now I put vim plugins in all IDE's and cVim for chrome.